I must once again thank Mike Cassidy at the Techno-Optimism FB group for the tip-off to this exciting development in battery technology. Please read the full article in USC News. If a battery based on this science can be mass-produced, utilities and other larger users and storers of energy can bank much, much more energy for later use.

However, there are some encouraging trends. One came this spring in the form of CDC/JAMA data that demonstrated “a significant decline in obesity among children aged 2 to 5 years.” Another is the increased use of personal fitness and health devices, including Fitbit, Nike’s Fuelband, and Jawbone’s Up. These devices and associated apps have helped thousands to meet their health and fitness goals. And the next generation of personal fitness tech will be in your smartphone. You won’t have to buy a clip-on or wrist band device to track your calories, steps and sleep. And the personal data will be much deeper and wider.

If you don’t think that foreign aid and development work work, check this out: 7,256 fewer children die every day thanks to the success of programs in developing countries combating infant death from diarrhea, malnutrition, pneumonia, AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

“If you compare today to the year 2000, there are now 7,256 fewer children dying every single day. If that doesn’t seem like a big deal, read it again, or think of it this way—there are 2.56 million fewer infant deaths each year compared to the year 2000. If you’re a parent, consider the 7,256 families that today did not have to contend with the death of their child.

Rational centralization was an organizing paradigm of the 20th century. Our age of innovation is all about decentralization. In our pockets we carry access to far more information than that contained at the Library of Congress. And phones (smart & dumb) now allow banking and ecommerce even for the poorest of the planet. Right now I’m blogging on my iPhone as I wait for a hot dog at a baseball game. Nowadays you can do everything anywhere.

For many, renewable energy is all about saving the planet, but for others it’s a way to get power to remote places that are off the grid. That’s much of the developing world. For example, the school and orphanage I help support in rural Kenya has several solar panels. This helps them charge computers and turn on some lights for evening study time, but its most important benefit is the recharging of cell phones, the great connectors and agents of positive change in places like Kenya, the rest of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Renewables get cheaper and cheaper, and thus more and more feasible for remote places in the developed world and remote and off-the-grid places in the developing world. Is getting on the grid impossible or prohibitively expensive? Install (increasingly cheaper) solar or wind power.

David Leonhardt’s sweeping assessment of the performance of our government over the last 200+ years is, well, sweeping, but it captures the heart of the problem of big government: Even if well-meaning programs help people in need, these efforts are often slow, inefficient and not very effective.

Progressives deem government programs worthy ipso facto, while the far right wants to vivisect the government–the good and the bad.

A third way is to set ideological assumptions aside and put programs to the test via the gold standard: the randomized study.

Leonhardt, in today’s New York Times, reports on a small but growing trend in testing government programs: